All This Stuff

Back from Origins, although it was kind of drive-by conventioneering for me, this time. I didn't do much.

Even after cancelling Gen Con, I was a little short on vacation time this year, so I had to wait until Friday to head down to Origins. I had planned to run several events, and then cancelled them all. I heard later that people were still able to sign up for them, so my apologies to anyone who was disappointed.

There are a couple of things I've never liked about running convention games. The first is pre-gens. One of the games I was running was a Cypher System one, and, despite a number of ways in which this game is fantastically easy to prep, making characters for people to play is fidgety and time-consuming.

The other thing I don't like is teaching people how to play the game. Nobody ever knows how to play the damn game. Sure, most real gamers know how d20 variants work, but anything else is a struggle. The last time I ran Cypher, the general alien-ness of the expendable attribute pools took what seemed like an eternity to get through, and of course I had to explain every single cypher to them. The game itself was a lot of fun, once everybody (sort of) knew how to play but, when you're GM'ing at conventions, that despicable boulder rolls back to the bottom of the hill with every new session.

So yeah, this time I just couldn't stand the thought of it. I don't know where that leaves me for the future. I've been in kind of a mood lately, so maybe it'll pass and none of this will be a thing. It was a nice trip anyway. I think Origins will make an acceptable replacement for the morbidly obese Gen Con, if I end up needing a replacement.

Oh, and I bought some stuff and got a few other things in trade. Here's the loot I came home with:

Dipping a Toe Into the Origins Pool

Tom and some of the other Peryton Gamers are going to Gen Con, but they're just going to run a few board games and a giant LARP. Not wanting to get involved with either of these, I've decided to just skip the whole deal. I've got a trip to Hawaii planned that's going to eat up my vacation time, so it's probably for the best. I am planning to try out Origins this year, though. The aforementioned vacation shortage means it'll only be a weekend trip, but that's still enough time to try running a few games.

Doctor Who: Claws in the Clouds
Friday 8:00 PM -- Doctor Who RPG
Above 31st Century Venus, humans living in an aerostat colony have recovered a long-buried zero-steel vessel from the surface. One silurian passenger has miraculously survived in suspended animation and been restored to life. Since then, there have been weird equipment failures and thefts throughout the station. To make matters worse, several groups of citizens have begun exhibiting strange cult-like behavior patterns. A Ninth Doctor adventure.

Dreams of Sarnath

Saturday 2:00 PM -- Cypher System

Despite the weirdness, it's really not that complicated. Enter the alien world that lies beneath all human dreams, swing some swords, sling some spells, and recover an object called a prevestige, which can somehow cross back into the real world. Then all you have to do is wake up and hand it over to Professor North. What could go wrong?

Origins 2009

We packed up and headed out for Columbus Friday afternoon. The con had been going since Wednesday, but we were just in for the weekend on this one. Our big gaming event has always been Gen Con Indy. That’s the one where we take time off work and go all out. But anyway, Origins is relatively close and is obviously a big deal, so off we go.

We did some ad hoc navigation and found our way to a Holiday Inn about a mile from the convention center, got settled there, and hoofed our way over to sign up for Origins. We got our badges, found Mandy and Steve (and Rick and Mike) in short order, had some dinner at the market, and re-acquainted ourselves with the “Big Bar” at the Hyatt. Went back to the hotel to chill, Tom limping along behind. I stayed up a bit to make the pre-gens for my Peryton RPG adventure and then we both crashed.

Saturday, we made our way down to the Convention Center again in plenty of time to have a look around, have lunch and have a few drinks before our events started at two. Narcissist that I am, I had to find where my stuff was displayed in the exhibit hall, and spotted our logo in a Studio 2 ad in the program. Tom went off to run “Song of the Songhai” for WHAP and I went to my own event.

I showed up at my Peryton RPG table to find Mandy, Steve, and a walk-in whose name I can’t remember. I wish I could, because his halfling wizard/berserker, Rabrell Pepperdane, was hilarious. We were just getting to the character distribution when another couple (Cathryn and John) showed up looking for a game, so I got to hand out all my pre-gen characters for once. Everyone named their character and came up with some background, giving us Sir Dirk (Steve’s human templar), Marlo (Mandy’s human fighter/mystic), Athena (Cathryn’s elf rogue), Lao (John’s orc fighter), and the aforementioned Rabrell Pepperdane.

It was, for me, one of the best Peryton RPG convention sessions ever. Of course, I can’t speak for the players, but I like to think that I wouldn’t have enjoyed running it so much if they hadn’t been engaged and having a good time as well. They only encountered a few of the horrors in my cursed village before making a run for the wizard’s tower, so they missed a lot of my background hooks, but at least the stuff they saw got them spooked enough to want to do that. Rabrell managed to find uses for several pieces of the junk I saddled him with, especially the garden spade and the block of cheese, but he never got up the nerve to consult his captive demon. Unfortunately, Rabrell’s player had to leave before they got to the tower.

In the tower, they fought some melting demons and a little intra-party conflict that had been brewing for a while came to a head. The argument was over the trustworthiness of the boy they had rescued back in the village. I don’t want to give too much away because we’re publishing this one eventually, but the kid was being tied up, sliced at, yanked out of the path of orc-spears, and repeatedly grilled for information. Luckily, Lao found time to wander up through the glowing rift into the Phlogiston and figure out how to put things right.

I was really pleased with the way the mechanics served the role-playing and the story in this session, and found that the removal of “alignment” (a change in the upcoming Revised Edition) didn’t unravel the fabric of society or anything. Of course, good players can make a lot of things work well, and I had a table full of those.

So anyway, the session ended with victory for the heroes. Some other stuff happened at the convention. I think we went out to eat, had some cocktails, and played Tunnels & Trolls or Yahtzee or something else with a lot of d6’s. We must have driven home at some point. Whatever. But man, that Peryton RPG game rocked!

Other, less important details are covered in Tom's write-up.

Origins 2008

We scouted out Origins last weekend and had a great time. Tom sums it up nicely on his blog, along with other stuff.

I got to try out 4th edition D&D, which... I don't know. Several things about this version are starting to bother me. Anyway, even if it was only because we had a good DM and players, it was fun.

Next year maybe I'll run some games.